Host Profile: Tom

As a teen, in the very late 1970s and early 1980s, I recall being very interested in technology of the time. A neighbor across the street where I lived was really into HAM radio and had this humongous multi-segmented HAM radio antenna on the roof of his house that would rotate to intercept frequencies in different positions. I thought that was pretty cool and his oldest son, who was just a bit older than me, got a computer. I would go to his house and he’d let me enter program code line-by-line. Hours of code and debugging the code for mistakes got me to love writing code and the thrill of seeing something work from all that code typed into a final program… saved to a cassette tape drive.

That computer system was a Commodore PET 2001. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and wanted one of my own. But I never did get one. At the time, they were expensive. I think I remember my parents laughing about it saying that computers don’t belong in anyone’s home. That was about the time people we saying computers were just a fad and would lose most people’s interest pretty quickly.

It wasn’t long after that, he got an Atari 2600 and I continued spending time across the street trading in typing in lines of code for playing games instead.

Fast forward about 6 years and I graduated high school and moved out to go to college. I really wish I would have stuck with the programming track in life because I would likely be a far better developer than I am today. Even playing video games took a backseat to being a musician and playing guitar and bass in bands over the next 10 years.

Then I got back to gaming when I picked up a new Sony Playstation in 1995. I feel in love with racing games and spent a lot of money to get the latest games. So much so that getting any other game console was out of the question. I wore that thing out!

I did get a Nintendo SuperNES but it was years after it had been out. I didn’t play that much. I knew about but never got an XBox console. I felt like I was such a kid late to the party from that point on. It was 5 years or so after the release of the XBox360 that I finally picked one up that was refurbished. Playing bass in bands took priority again from 1997 – 2003. It took another 5 years after that to finally get that XBox360 and the love of the latest video games on whatever would play games. I did have a PS2 and a PSP before getting the XBox360, but I think I played mostly on the PSP when I traveled occasionally here and there.

I still play music (the podcast theme music is performed and recorded by me) and now have systems hooked up everywhere. I had a PS3 a short time before the PS4 was launched and although I have an XBoxOne, I still have an XBox360 as well. I play some games on a WiiU and although I have several PSPs around, I love playing games on my PS Vita.

A musician, gamer and a photographer pretty much tells you about me in a nutshell. My day job is Graphic and UX/UI Designer.

Most of my hours are spent being a nerd, playing games and looking for loot boxes. 🙂